The oldest enemy of e-commerce has always been customer drop-off, losing potential customers during various points in your purchase funnel as they slip through the gaps in your carefully crafted user journey. It often left us feeling like Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Roadrunner. In-app commerce could be the end of all that.
Since the demise of the 3-click-rule, B2C social selling has been evolving into a solution too good to be true, finally marrying the ideal user experience with effective targeting.
The culmination of this evolution has been the recent wave of ‘buy’ buttons emerging on social networks, apps and ad portals, creating a world where it is so easy to buy things I have just bought a kilo of marshmallows on Amazon with 1-click while typing this sentence.
With the global e-commerce market set to exceed $2 Trillion in 2016, it’s easy to see why everyone is angling for a bigger share-of-wallet.
The latest development in the social e-commerce race comes from Facebook re-vamping their Pages platform to include a shop section with buy buttons, keeping the entire shopping experience within Facebook. This functionality was introduced almost a year ago on ads but has taken a while to transform into the full shop fronts launched today.
Here is how the major players are tackling ‘Buy-Now’ –
Google
Google recently announced that buy buttons will appear on its mobile search results, allowing purchase of listed items within Google.
Facebook
The ‘Buy’ buttons have been live for a while in ads and will shortly be added to Pages also.
Twitter
In-Tweet purchases have been available in the US for a while now but only on iPhone and Android Twitter apps. There are rumours that a desktop version is on the way.
YouTube
In-ad buy buttons are now live in TrueView ads but still take the user to a third party site to complete the purchase.
Pinterest
The announcement of ‘Buy-it’ on Pinterest has been and gone, but we are yet to see it either in the app or on the desktop site yet.
Snapchat
Snapchat is definitely bringing in-app purchases to the platform, but right now we don’t know if it will be through Discover or the ad platform.
Instagram
Instagram has a ‘shop now’ button available in its ad platform, but in-app commerce hasn’t arrived yet, although this is certainly on the way.
It’s a safe bet that any platform that doesn’t adopt some form of in-app buy now will be left to fight over the scraps from the ecommerce table.
How do you see this shaping the social media world for marketers? Let us know in the comments.
